BGP Version 4 (BGP4) is used today on the Internet backbone as a major routing protocol (see for example, Y. Rekhter and T. Li, “A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4),” IETF RFC 1774, (1995); RFC1771, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1771.txt; and J. W. Stewart III, “BGP4: Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet,” Addison-Wesley (1998)). BGP4 uses TCP/IP to connect peer routers. These routers are called BGP speakers. If a pair of routers has established a BGP connection, then they are said to be peers to each other. A router can have more than one BGP peer. BGP peer connection goes through a negotiating session in which connecting peers exchange OPEN messages, containing router ID, as numbers etc. If negotiations are successful, then the peer connection is said to be established. Routers will send route update messages, which will either advertise new prefixes or withdraw previously advertised prefixes. A prefix contains an IP address and IP mask pair, which define the reachability of the network represented by the prefix. Normally, a BGP speaker will establish connections to several peer BGP speakers. Hence, a BGP speaker receives (and sends) prefix updates from/to these multiple peers.
A BGP speaker will select its best routes among the received and self-configured routes. The selection procedure can be simple or complex, depending on the router route-selection-policy configuration. The best routes will be used for data forwarding of the router. A BGP speaker sends an update of only its best routes to a peer BGP speaker.
Almost all the Internet traffic is controlled by BGP4, and Internet stability is of great importance. Any disruption to Internet backbone routing caused by hardware and/or software failure will affect substantially all network entities. The stability of backbone routing is heavily dependent upon both hardware and software stability. The platforms that run BGP4 software can crash, and any of these failures will cause instability on the Internet backbone. Other prior art solutions use redundant hardware. Nevertheless, the peer routers on the Internet backbone still detect peer routers going down and up, which will cause instability in the backbone.